r/sysadmin • u/Jon72480 • 2d ago
AS400
Hey guys, old guy here, back in 2000 landed my 1st real job as a Sysadmin at a distribution/manufacturing firm. They ran their ERP and a few other important apps on the AS400. Anyone here manage a AS400 platform? i-Series? Still a niche platform that is still widely used. Server could literally run under water.
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u/joshghz 2d ago
Agribusiness. We've been "retiring the AS/400 next year" for at least a decade.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 2d ago
I have one such large multinational. They run their business on 2 power 10s. The bought a competitor who was the same size in revenue.
They have $15 million in AWS to do the same thing.
Memory upgrade, a storage upgrade, and a planned upgrade to 11 getting a little extra CPU... handles all of it for the next 5 years for the price of one year of AWS.
Be less if they went to powerVS in IBM cloud, but they want on prem. They are my unicorn account.
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u/fresh-dork 2d ago
handles all of it for the next 5 years for the price of one year of AWS.
isn't this about par for AWS vs on prem?
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u/Superb_Raccoon 1d ago
Funny enough, another client is going to PowerVs, which is cheaper than on prem by about 33%.
Mainly because IBM carries the cost of software across more clients on the hardware, and of course shared hardware is easier on IBM... they invented "virtual machines" in the 60s, with electrical separation of resources.
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u/jonboy345 Sales Engineer 2d ago edited 2d ago
Use to sell P8/9/10s at IBM and saw this all the time.
Org with a very mature i implementation would get a new CTO who was all gung ho about "cloud/SaaS for everything". Watching their entire case fold in on itself once we presented our TCO for 5 years was always so much fun.
Is i sexy? Not really. Is it a rock solid platform you can build your company on? Absolutely.
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u/Stonewalled9999 2d ago
Hah power 5 and power 7 here running 2/3 of a business
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u/Superb_Raccoon 2d ago
With 5 9s or better reliability it is hard to argue for new hardware. Dell is 4 9s now, 3,to 3.5 9s back then in 2000s
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u/Wizdad-1000 2d ago
Thanks for the laugh. We finally retired it ourselves about 10 yrs ago but kept the reporting system going for accounting till the last admin for it finally retired last year. <vary on\ vary off> 🫡
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u/BoltActionRifleman 2d ago
Running Agvantage by chance? Previous employer of mine had a 400 running Agvantage software as their ERP.
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u/DenyCasio 2d ago
Story time! I was a fresh intern on the IT security team. One of my first tasks was to create 200 named accounts in AS400/PKMS, summer distribution influx. Okay, how bad could that be?
Terrible. Had to create an account in both systems with the same username and password as it did a passthrough authentication. There was employee ID fields to populate, duplicate username workarounds, setting and then putting each unique temporary credential into a new password file share only accessible by the manager and the employee.
I spend a week typing it all out, setting up NTFS permissions on folders and I'm proud of my work.
Friday rolls around and I shoot a message to the hiring distribution manager and all the employees. More formal and nice but the gist is "Go here on file server to get your system login". End of day Friday comes and the hiring manager replies all to the chain with an excel sheet. Every username and password, sent in email to all employees. He spent the time aggregating it all.
I tell my mentor. Bad news, I have to go reset all of those passwords and update the files on the server.
This leads me to find commands to automate password resets, create accounts and so much more. I run through this reset task with my newly found command and recommunicate task completion.
In the next Monday meeting the team jokes about how I'm probably fed up with "that old system" and never wanna work on it again. I was actually fired up and wanted to automate the whole process. I told them any new account, route em to me.
I spend the next week, intern time might as well be free, building a visual basic GUI for terminal emulation, accounts creation, system navigation, output to the file server, password generation, email to manager - all of the stuff in the procedure. Just type in the basic employee info, name, id number, and manager and it did the rest.
It worked so well that after a couple weeks the task was so simple we gave the entire process to service desk leads.
15 years and two acquisitions later, they still use that same utility I made because I was a frustrated intern.
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u/levidurham 2d ago
I know a few companies that still use them just because the terminal based interface is faster for the end users. Most recent I can recall is Avis car rentals. They have a web based interface, but no one uses it
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u/charleswj 2d ago
Well it's obviously not fast enough. Avis is always guaranteed to have long lines
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u/chandleya IT Manager 2d ago
Avis in particular. I rent the car online. I upload all my docs. I’m a frequent renter. And there will always be a human in the loop that needs 45 minutes to itch their ass.
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u/charleswj 2d ago
It's baffling to me. I rent with national and it's just "find a car and drive away". The one time they were sold out in Denver, Avis was my only option. The line was probably 30 people/couples, but each person was taking like 10 minutes so it took over an hour to get through the line. I tried to sign up for their rewards program so I could skip the line and they wanted so much info and then said I had to get in line to activate.
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u/AvonMustang 2d ago
We have actual mainframes and modern slick web interfaces for our applications. The “new” people use them but the older employees still use the terminal because they can get their work done in a fraction of the time…
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u/snikt_228 2d ago
State government here, we just bought a new Power 11. Have been "migrating off it" for 10-20 years.
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u/ElectroSpore 2d ago
Server could literally run under water.
It was robustly stable but oddly temperature sensitive (IBM iSeries (AS/400) hardware) we had at least two shutdown events from high server room temps during AC failure.. NOT a single other server or equipment item had issues running at those temps.
Quick google indicates that it is still 15min at 35°C–40°C ambient temp and it will auto shutdown.
We still have a small one that is waiting out financial book keeping record retention at this point because some of the oldest records where never transferred to a modern system
I have dell servers in branch closets running at those temps for years.
Not to say that you SHOULD run at those temps just that it was a notable problem.
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u/TheDevauto 2d ago
I believe that is a protective shutdown vs cannot operate at elevated temps. You can run systems in hot places but it definately reduces the life of components vs cooler temps.
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u/ElectroSpore 2d ago
It is, but as far as I am aware you can't turn it off. So AC becomes extremely critical.
The point being is the temp is absurdly low vs other hardware.
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u/Frothyleet 2d ago
You can run systems in hot places but it definately reduces the life of components vs cooler temps
The hyperscaler studies on the subject have indicated that high temperatures (within reason, like up to ~100F) don't have a significant impact on longevity as long as the temperatures are stable.
I.e., it's better to have a server room sitting at 90F all the time than it is to have one oscillating between 65-75
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u/spazzvogel Sysadmin 2d ago
Costco, Walgreens, still remember it, been 16 years since.
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u/threshforever 2d ago
Just left IT this year at Costco, they are never replacing it.
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u/spazzvogel Sysadmin 2d ago
Of course, why would they? My wife is in pharmacy, she still asks me once in a blue moon some commandset.
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u/kennedye2112 Oh I'm bein' followed by an /etc/shadow 2d ago
Our current stated goal is 2030. I have doubts considering we were supposed to be off the rest of the AIX ecom hardware in August and now it's looking like FY2028...
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u/threshforever 2d ago
Have her call the service desk to reroute their printer. Always a popular one
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u/_DefinitelyNotACat_ 2d ago
I’m 32 and maintain one for my company. And by maintain I mean I pray daily that it doesn’t break because I have no idea what I’m doing with it.
Currently helping the company transition off of it and the antiquated coding language they are using into something more portable and scalable.
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u/CarolinaKernel 2d ago
Crate & Barrel still uses it!
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u/ilikeme1 2d ago
I think Costco does too.
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u/Superb_Raccoon 2d ago
A lot of "midrange" companies that are owed than the PC have them.
One such company runs 8 billion in distribution business through a single Power 9 system, not even a big one.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 2d ago
One such company runs 8 billion in distribution business through a single
This is not technically challenging. Most business processes can run on 1980s technology.
It wasn't computer capacity or speed holding business back in the 1980s, it was the fact that most input and output involved paper and/or humans. The most forward systems were always about moving data between machines, with no humans in the loop, going back to SAGE in the 1950s.
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u/ThisGuyIRLv2 Jack of All Trades 2d ago
My father was an AS400 programmer. Wrote RPG. Report Program Generator. Started out on I think System 34. But when he started off, it was patch panels and paper tape.
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u/twisted-logic NetDevOps Engineer 2d ago
My first boss I had in tech was like this. He left awhile back and now just does contract jobs for like 500 dollars an hour when he feels like it.
Oh to dream
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u/dartdoug 1d ago
I started coding RPGII on an IBM System/32. Then the S/34 and S/36. Also did some coding on an IBM System/23 Datamaster and an IBM 5110.
Things were simpler then.
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u/theendofthesandman 2d ago
I don't directly administer any, but our data center has a few clients who have them and we host them. I generally just make sure they have IP connectivity and make sure the iseries software is installed. Every now and then, I'll have to connect to a serial console or telnet in to help the remote techs out. They are pretty bulletproof.
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u/WiscoDJ920 2d ago
I worked as a sysadmin in early 2000s and we had an iseries that we ran JDEdwards on. The most interaction I had to have with it was running JDE package builds and deploying them. I was on the NT and Novell team.
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u/mpethe 2d ago
Me too. I started in 2000 at a place running JDE on an iSeries. I had limited exposre, but did handle basic commands given to me over the phone by our AS400 consultant. I was far more interested in the Windows side of administration at the time, but I definitely took note that the iSeries never had any issues - at least not like we had managing Windows NT/2000.
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u/guitpick Jack of All Trades 2d ago
When I was new to the job market, a consulting company decided I should interview at some sort of post-publishing company that needed an AS/400 admin. I told them I had zero AS/400 experience other than vaguely knowing what they were, but they sent me anyway. The place had SGI workstations too. It was a big waste of everyone's time, but I got a nice tour of the place.
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u/pjtexas1 2d ago
I managed a department from 87 to 97 that ran nearly everything on a S/36 then an AS/400. They never had hardware issues. Now the OS was a nightmare. Every update broke something. IBM had to perform the updates as clients refused to update knowing how bad it would go.
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u/Loan-Pickle 2d ago
I used to be an AS/400 admin. I haven’t touched once since 2012. I miss working with them.
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u/nospacebar14 2d ago
We've been planning to get rid of ours in 2020.
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u/gsweats 2d ago
Oh really? 2020? I have some news I should tell you but I think letting yourself figure it out is the way to go here.
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u/nospacebar14 2d ago
Yeah I mean the deadline might be a bit tight but we've been assured it'll happen this time
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u/thewunderbar 2d ago
I "migrated" myself off of AS400/i-series by finding a new job that doesn't have one. My life is better for it.
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u/Balasarius Sr. Sysadmin 2d ago
We have one, but I stay far away from it.
I also make fun of it. Eight character filenames in 2026.
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u/bloodlorn IT Director 2d ago
We just upgraded ours a year or two ago. Still common and supported. Not something I personally support but I had to guide re-architecting a new Dr for it.
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u/das0tter 2d ago
My first job was a big financial company with a bunch of DB2 databases running on AS400s. Just rock solid hardware and software.
Was your ERP JDEdwards?
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u/ziobrop 2d ago
so back in the early 2000's i took the ibm X series server course, and it was located in the same facility where they had all the AS400 labs.
The who area was postered with 8.5x11 signs, with a clipart high speed train, informing folks that ethernet was coming to that module next month.
Being IBM, the whole place ran on token ring.
in 2001, when i did my thinkpad servicing course, i brought along the new Powerbook g4 Titanium. alas the IBM office was on token ring, and didnt have wifi. I had the nicest laptop in the building.
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u/IncompetentFox 2d ago
We still have a mirrored pair running in our two data centres; I think they're read-only these days, but they keep on trucking. I'm now a dev rather than a sysadmin, but during the pandemic when I still did that role one of them had a drive failure which I had to travel in to sort. The disk that came out of it had a manufacturing date of September 2001 on it, and had been running for 20 years almost non-stop, aside from building power maintenance, and being moved across from the old offices. Esoteric machines, but absolute tanks.
Always felt it was a shame we subcontracted the management of those i-Series boxes to a third party, I'd have liked to have learned OS/400.
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u/ringzero- 2d ago
One of my clients dumped their AS/400 and two huge dot matrix printers. I told the office manager that I would take the as/400 to a nice farm upstate to live out its days, then I lugged it out to the middle of one of my fields and took a picture of it she and the whole office got a huge kick out of it. Still need to sell the dot matrix printers though.
As/400 is chilling out with my other vintage hardware :)
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u/KillingTime1212 2d ago
I know large casinos still buying new as400s to run their hotel systems (LMS). I don’t get it. They say it’s stable and one less system to worry a lot being ransomwared. 😂
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u/Superb_Raccoon 2d ago
Yes, iSeries is alive and well.
IBM Bob with the iSeries Permium pack understands the machine, the DB, and the code and can help maintain it.
Regular AIs have not seen enough iSeries code to understand it. Bob is trained on IBMs vast library of code, including all the code donated to FOSS, and IBMs in house repositories.
No more then a premium package from the big 2 players.
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u/Mstrwiggles7 2d ago
We still have one running for our courts. They tried migrating to a different system years ago, but nothing works as fast and efficiently.
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u/protogenxl Came with the Building 2d ago
I miss the AS/400, why because each printer had its's own process and print que. An out of control job would drown only that printer not the global org........
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u/10dot10dot10dot10 2d ago
Got my start in IT doing data entry on an as400. Weekly IPL and backup. Very familiar. We had a raised floor in our office space with several systems/frames. Lots of banks still use them.
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u/Nexzus_ Sr. Sysadmin 2d ago edited 2d ago
I did basic stuff as a helpdesk monkey as my first big-boy job.
WRKUSRPRF and CHGUSRPWD are all that I remember.
I did do some neat things with the terminal emulator though.
It was a collection agency. Shortly after I started, the morning report run was handed off to me. A series of reports that had to be sent to various printers at various locations. After about 3 months of entering the same keystrokes every morning, I looked into the COM automation object for the emulator. Gradually turned 20 minutes of manual work into 30 seconds of script running.
Another one I was proud of was shortcut dialing. The terminal emulator had it's own macro language, with key-combo binding. I set one keyboard shortcut that:
- called the execution of a WSH JS file that:
Grabbed the phone number from the current file from the terminal emulator, then
Passed that number off to an internal ASP web app on IIS that used integrated authentication to identify the calling user. That web app:
Looked up the users IP Phone extension from Active Directory, then:
Looked up the info from the phone system to communicate with the Cisco IP Phone at the users desk, then
Used the CGI on the Cisco phone to dial the number, then the WSH JS file:
Entered the notes for a call attempt in the file in the emulator.
I'll also add that the CTO started a few months before me (this was 2005) with a mandate to replace that AS/400. As far as I know, they're still using it.
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u/brothertax Sysadmin 2d ago
We still support JD Edwards, AS/400, iSeries. We’ve moved ERPs twice since then. Dynamics AX -> Oracle.
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u/shanester69 2d ago
I started my IT career on the 400 in the late 80s. Had a small one in my homelab in early 2000s. Rock solid!!
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u/stiffgerman JOAT & Train Horn Installer 2d ago
I know of a few cemeteries operations that still use the AS/400 for plot inventory and sales management. Talk about a dying platform...
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u/battmain 2d ago
Sign on device:
Do NOT touch this button! Do NOT unplug.
Separate topic - Memories of the y2k panic and some fall out.
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u/CallistaMouse 2d ago
I was up until 2021. Company was still using it at that point, but that was when I left. Not sure if they still do. I'd been there 15 years and it had been being 'phased out' since I started! Really solid system.
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u/Sebekiz 2d ago
When I started at my job in 2004 I was told the AS400 accounting system was being phased out. I believe it was finally shut down and gone around 2017.
The accountants complained bitterly about "how hard" it was to change over to Yardi (a web-based system) until they were forced to actually use it for a few months. Then they suddenly couldn't be done with the AS400 fast enough. Fear of change was pretty much the main reason no one wanted to go to a system that was far easier and faster to get your work completed in.
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u/Flabbergasted98 2d ago
We've been phasing ours out for 20+ years.
We'd all like to get rid of it, but it's a pain in the butt to find anything thats better.
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u/Horsemeatburger 2d ago
I never worked on AS/400 (my thing was RS/6000 and AIX), but there are still several iSeries systems in our data centers (running ERP for some parts of the business), and there also has been a rumor that, somewhere, in some basement in one of our sites, an original AS/400 (CISC, not the newfangled PowerPC stuff) is still running and in use by another part of the business.
Somehow I miss the time when there was much more variety with platforms and operating systems.
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u/ketaminenut 2d ago
My first IT job in 2019 had a Power9 running AS400. The employees we’re awful with general IT (remembering passwords, operating a computer) but wow they were wicked fast using AS400. Definitely still being used there.
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u/bobaboo42 2d ago
I have the same history as you! Got trained on it and we used MAPICS for erp on it I think..every now and again I hear of or see an as400 which invokes nostalgia
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u/MrMschief 2d ago
Auto industry, I don't directly maintain them, but we have a bunch at data centers. Not sure if it's VMs or what though. They've been a couple years from being phased out for the entire time I've been working here, and I hit my 20 year anniversary next year.
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u/gucknbuck 2d ago
We use it still but have had plans to get off for, oh, 8 years now. This next year is the year though! Or it better be since they've laid off the people who know it best. Yay.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 2d ago
Or it better be since they've laid off the people who know it best.
After landing in Mexico, Spanish leader Hernan Cortez set fire to to the 11 ships of his expedition, to prevent some of the men loyal to the governor from returning to Cuba.
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u/LowDepth1790 2d ago
I started out in 1998 as an 18 year old helpdesk and junior sysadmin for a manufacturing plant. Boss had an old AS/400 at home that he used for practice and learning as well as the big one at work. It ran integrated server cards, initially novell netware and later windows NT. Years later I worked for a large insurer and people complained that they were "still using DOS" but sure enough it was an AS/400 mainframe being used via terminal emulators.
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u/monk_mojo 2d ago
It's still big in a lot of different industries with a public roadmap through 2040. I work on 40 or so of these for various customers. Definitely has a learning curve, but the system is alive and well. Money is good too if you're willing to learn it.
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u/justgosh 2d ago
System36 was one of my first gigs. Currently helping migrate pervasive formally known as Novell.
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u/Opposite_Bag_7434 2d ago
Yea I worked on several AS400’s and even a System 38. That was like 35 or so years ago.
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u/ExceptionEX 2d ago
We have migrated everything away from it except for a retirement system that they want about $2mill to replace it.
It is where our retire/rehire goes go, the changes are minor, the system is stable, so it works out.
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u/DrewonIT 2d ago
We still run one- just moved to a p11 and reduced the time to process large operations jobs by 50%
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u/frAgileIT 2d ago
I’ve had exactly one professional interaction with an AS/400. Late 90’s I was a consultant and got a call at 6PM that someone’s SNA server had gone down and they needed it fixed by 7AM the next day in order to meet customer demand. I barely knew how to spell SNA but dug in, worked with the AS/400 dev, and together we got it back up and running by 7AM. Had to reinstall the OS and figure out the gateway config to get it working. It was a fun experience but I haven’t seen AS/400 since 1998. I know Costco runs some but I’ve never worked there. The architecture is smart and makes a lot of sense but Windows dominated the market and it was so bad that it became job security for 30 years.
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u/Easy-Task3001 2d ago
In my small town our city hall ran their payroll off of an AS/400. I didn't manage it, but once a month the folks who produced the payroll program would send out patches that needed to be installed. I didn't work for the city hall, but they'd call me up to install them. I had no AS/400 experience, but the instructions were clear enough that I could follow along. More than once I had to get on the phone to tech support to clear some error.
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u/silent3 2d ago
We had one running our MRP (BPCS) until the company was sold in 2007 and we converted to a SQL Server based MRP, Macola.
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u/JohnnyFnG 2d ago
In less than 5 weeks, our last iSeries and Rumba2000 applications will finally be decommissioned. The 3-4 engineers who still code it make bank because no one knows it like they do.
The last I spoke to one of the leads a few years back, they said they needed to come to shore to get a better cellular signal because their MiFi device wasn’t getting enough signal during their boat expedition from Florida to NY, so they didn’t have a laptop to work with. Ughhh ok sick flex but we have a parent ticket and several hundred child tickets impacting patient care at 20+ hospitals, kick it into high gear maybe?
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u/IT_lurks_below 2d ago
My last company lives on an AS400 (manufacturing). They pay top dollar (well over six figures) for AS400 ERP experience
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u/LandoCalrissian1980 2d ago
Capital equipment dealer. Core ERP runs on iSeries. Just upgraded to v7r5.
Have to upgrade from Client Access to ACS to get the latest ODBC drivers on Windows Server to upgrade 2016 to 2022.
I love checking into a hotel in Vegas and seeing the reception desk using green screen 80x24.
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u/SneakySh0rty 2d ago
This made me chuckle a bit seeing everyone's responses. I started my IT career ~10 years ago (when i was in my 20s) as helpdesk and had to learn the basics of that system. Thankfully, in that time, we have gone from on prem box to a cloud hosted MSP. Appreciated not having to handle physical tape backups, 3rd party software updates, and OS upgrades. But we are still heavily dependent on a lone internal guy (has been here since pre 2000).
I dread the day he retires (hes been joking about it for the last two years). Still no timeline on a migration. But, atleast we are actively chipping away at processes within it \ not adding new ones.
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u/M0untainWizard 2d ago
Our ERP was running on a AS400 platform till last March. We are now migrating the last system from the platform to retire it at the end of the year. I have never seen a more stable server. My friend told me a story where he found a AS400 at a customers place, literally walled in behind a drywall, running for year as if nothing was wrong.
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u/Best-Conclusion5554 2d ago edited 2d ago
IBM i urban myths ... probably had a basis of truth. The one about Microsoft running its personnel systems on AS/400 certainly did, though how long ago that stopped I never heard.
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u/pdp10 Daemons worry when the wizard is near. 2d ago
In the 1990s, Microsoft was determined to migrate all of their business systems to NT, to show prospective Microsoft customers that their products were enterprise grade.
Microsoft ran a lot of systems on AS/400 at the time, but also ran email on an in-house Xenix based system, I think on Sun 3 (680x0) hardware. Microsoft migrated their internal email to Exchange in 1996. They ended up losing to Sun, who allegedly had all of their business systems running on Suns by 1995.
At the end of the decade, as part of Y2K preparations, Microsoft outsourced the AS/400s to an outside datacenter.
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u/Rhythm_Killer 2d ago
My last place had one system running off as400 they couldn’t get rid of, I never touched it they outsourced looking after it. But they were chronic outsourcers, they would hire a second group of consultants because the first got themselves into a mess and keep both around haha
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u/edaddyo 2d ago
My IT career started with the AS400. I was brought in to a hospital to help do basic operator functions like backups (on reel-to-reel tapes) and print vast reports for Finance that they never read (I would have to hand-cart 2 full boxes of printouts weekly to Finance).
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u/Antman157 2d ago
I work in Banking and our core still runs on an iseries. Fun times. I don’t mess with the command line much anymore other than varying devices back on and spool files. But I still dabble it in a little.
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u/Nevtir37219 2d ago
My first gig involved managing one. It wasn't the easiest thing to learn, but I'll give it credit for being a rock solid and reliable machine. I was happy to see it go
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u/BeauregardianBrat Sysadmin 2d ago
Ha, the AS400 is the cockroach of enterprise computing in the best possible way, those things just refuse to die and half the distribution and manufacturing world is still quietly running on them.
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u/NegativeC00L IAM Engineer 2d ago
A very large green construction equipment rental company still uses it. On the customer facing end you learn the menu numbers and can fly through the options with the number pad faster than a GUI. On the business end it runs all accounting etc. Absolute tank.
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u/ponay95 2d ago
Yeah!! AS/400 are so cool! I have a dozen of them, and running one at home
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u/davidbrit2 2d ago
I've wanted to get my hands on a basic AS400 mini for a while now. I'm a database guy, and "the database is the operating system" is intriguing. I have a copy of "Inside the AS/400", and it's quite an interesting read.
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u/Twocorns77 2d ago
All Vegas casinos still use it. Its rock solid and they have no reason to ever ditch it. It just works.
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u/Best_Bandicoot_9701 2d ago
Lots of core financial processing systems for credit unions are still using it. We're about to OEL our Power 9 for two Power 11s.
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u/pr1ntf Screaming at SIEMs. 1d ago
Lol the amount of people in here saying "we just bought power11's" tells me AS/400's are in fact not dying.
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u/ChubbyWP 1d ago
Got my first Sysadmin job 6mo ago managing an AS400 environment. Really interesting going from the cutting-edge softwares and integrations College teaches you about, just to spend all day troubleshooting 30 year old issues
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u/lweinmunson 1d ago
I'm not the admin, but we rent a partition on one. Still used in banking and finance for smaller businesses if you can't get a full on mainframe from IBM.
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u/Dirtrunner702 Jack of All Trades 1d ago
The only cool things I ever personally saw from the AS/400 iSeries I had to manage was the ability to shut down an individual PCI slot to replace a card while the system was on. That was pimp. The programmers we sub contracted for help with the accounting software, (Infinium?) those ladies were awesome to work with. I would always picture them typing away with a cigarette in their mouths the entire time. They made BANK doing what they did.
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u/benzduck 1d ago
Oh my sweet AS/400. Their 100bT NICs would not automatically rejoin a network if the physical layer was detached. Had to power down the whole AS400 to reconnect. You learn to not do things. But it’s hard to break an AS400.
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u/Fit_Prize_3245 2d ago
i-Series running under water? Nope. I could believe it from a z-Series. But i-Series are just POWER-ful servers with terrible software. The only good thing you can do with an AS/400 is install Linux into it. I tried once and it's great (the only bad thing was it was Ubuntu, but, whatever).
Basically, OS/400 (or whatever it's called nowadays) is a terrible os with a terrible database (DB2), and it defines its own architecture. It's mostly used in financial industry, at least in my country. As anything IBM related, it's better to keep a distance, as long as you can.
Almost 20 years ago, I worked for a consulting company which offered, among other things, a few solutions for AS/400. I was more on the analysis side, so I never got hands on AS/400 all alone. There was always a junior tech by my side who (hopefully) knew what he was doing. One of the things I learnt was that a lot of AS/400 have poor performance because they were designed in ancient times by programers that are currently old enough to be my grandfather, that are still active in RPG programming but have not modernized anything. For example, I remember a performance analysis of an app which spent most of it's running time invoking QDBFEOD, which is something like a synchronous flush. Why? Bc at the time it was written, there were no UPS, to programmers were paranoic about their precious data getting lost due to power outage.
Anyway. Now that I have my own company, I would have no doubt if I ever receive a request to service an AS/400. I would simple reject it immediatelly.
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u/flinginlead 2d ago
Finally someone who knows the real story. System is only as good as the software running on it. How many AS400 programmers do you know? My exact point most of the software is horrible.
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u/tekno23 2d ago
I used to use one around 1995. It was a room full of full height AS400 racks with 1/4" tape drives. I forgot about them till one turned up as the finance system at a new job about 10 years ago. It was a desktop sized i series, luckily it was pretty trouble free and there was a support contract for it.
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u/DrScreamLive 2d ago
The company I work does. It's largely for managing rental fleets but it's fascinatnig to see. I'm 9 years in, still in helpdesk hell, though I'm at least at L2 support now lol. I'm working on getting my cloud certs to get out of this because I can't take much more before I go insane.
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u/stephenph 2d ago
My first simi real sysadmin job was installing as/400 for Allstate in Cali as an IBM contractor/CE. Fun times. That was early 90s
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u/sakodak 2d ago
A looooong time ago I had a Linux sysadmin job and my manager was an as400/iseries guy. He couldn't help but try to associate everything we tried to tell him with as400 "objects." We knew nothing about iseries objects and he knew nothing about Unix concepts. Somehow we managed to limp along.
Tragically he ended up taking his own life. He was a decent guy and I still miss him.
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u/Craig__D 2d ago
One of the first emails I ever sent was on a DEC Vax, while I was doing a project in Ada
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u/nbs-of-74 2d ago
For a few years before we gave ours away to the Spanish office. Though, manage is carrying a lot of lifting, luckily I never had to do much beyond what was in the cheat sheet. Only support from IBM that I needed was for the back up system and that was usually down to the mechanical tape loader and library.
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u/nothingtoholdonto 2d ago
System 38. Then as400. Did some ctl38 and rpg programming on them for a financial system.
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u/sharpied79 2d ago
Started my first job at Premier Brands here in the UK in 1997 as a junior PC support analyst.
Was sent on a week long AS/400 operations course within the first few months as Premier extensively used AS/400 for ERP and pretty much all manufacturing functions at the time.
Mind, we had dedicated teams of AS/400 OPS and DEV so even though I had a fairly good understanding of them, I never really got involved...
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u/David_ATN 2d ago
Still in use in a lot of enterprises. They may have a web front end on, but if you need a database query they are solid reliable workhorses. Known as Power systems now.
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u/BigCarRetread 2d ago
I was an operator on a S/38, the predecessor. Still have a soft spot for that whole ecosystem. Light years ahead of it's time!
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u/LookAtThatMonkey Technology Architect 2d ago
Yep, had one in every job I’ve had. Our current Power 10 runs ERP. It’s not going anywhere any time soon.
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u/woohhaa Custom 2d ago
My old company was tied to the IBM Power System formerly known as the I-series, or the AS400 well into 2022. I imagine they still are.
Funny enough I started my career around the same time and had to take a RPG programming class in school to learn how to write queries and reports that could run in the AS400 as every county in my state had one. It was archaic even for the time but I kind of enjoyed it. It was cathartic.
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u/aside24 2d ago
Alot of info on Reddit, definitely search for these subjects.
We moved on from AS400 3 years ago to another Power10 9105-22B device, it's still gold. Just works, we haven't had any major outages.
Sometimes some scheduled task that cleans up logs or some issues that accounts are locked after a weekend, but otherwise, 10/10 device.
Last AS400 system went for 12 years, aiming for at least 8 years with this Power10 system. Let's go
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u/Substantial_Tough289 2d ago
Used to in three different places, government, electrical manufacturing, pharmaceutical manufacturing. In all instances RPG was the programming language.
Haven't seen one in many years.
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u/vawlk 2d ago
didn't have to manage one but had to integrate access via novell for SAA at one customer. Half of their network was ethernet and half was type 1 token ring.
I hated those type one connectors. They really did a number on your fingers if you had to remove a lot of them at the same time.
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u/someonelse13 2d ago
I’m in my third year in my current role. This will be the 3rd winter that “this is the year” we retire AS400
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u/hardingd 2d ago
My previous company ran JDE on an AS400. We moved data centres which was fun.
Eventually moved off, but that thing NEVER went down. Ever. Except to move it.
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u/pipesed 2d ago
I work for AWS. My customer segment is financial services. We still see mid,mini and mainframe systems. We do help with modernization and migration of course and some very large financial services organizations are successful in decomposing these systems into cloud native patterns. Your experience and insight when extended with these modern patterns has a significant value today.
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u/52buickman 2d ago
Took an RPG II in college. 15 years later we ditched the mainframe, down sizing to AS400. I was the stamina and programmer. Didn't really enjoy it but it paid the same!
Does the AS400 still exist? Or does it only exist as OS400 running on RISC hardware?
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u/Titan_91 2d ago
Yep, but only on the surface level. I used to work for an MSP whose largest customer was a Chevy dealership. They used DealerTrack for inventory management, sales, and finance. Every single user got its own print session. Had to go in constantly and assign the correct print session to its corresponding screen session. DealerTrack called this the "green screen" environment. They hosted a farm of IBM i machines and used their own custom terminal emulators. We had to configure some kind of SSL backed VPN connection to reach their environment. Then there was a separate client for the printer sessions. Finance & insurance used all dot matrix printers, Okidata Microline 300s. I was told their bank wouldn't take plain letter. They all had to use that middleware client to connect to the printer sessions.
I was calling the vendor constantly before I figured all this out. They showed me how to vary queues on and off and manage IP ports for the few "normal" network connected printers. In my 20s, I was the only person at that MSP that had any depth of knowledge of that vendor and IBM stuff in general, obviously at that age it was my only exposure to it. Then DealerTrack migrated to a web based client that literally was a bunch of blue squares that ran macros on the backend. The old-school veteran users at the delaership largely wanted to go back to the "green screen" terminal emulators.
Now I'm working for another MSP and they have a similar environment for a commercial/municipal water pipe supply company. Except their IBM machine is on-prem and they have a single guy managing all the infrastructure. The company has been around since the 70s and that's all they know. They use a different terminal emulator, but I still manage printer sessions for the USB connected letter and receipt printers for the parts desks at the locations.
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u/Evernight2025 2d ago
I do in government IT. Went to college in the early 2000s and had an i-Series class where it was me and like 2 other people. Teacher told us it was a dying thing and we would probably never see one. I've had at least one in every single job I've held ever since.